You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.

I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

Much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot.